ehopper@ehpcb.wlk.com (Ed Hopper) (10/28/90)
I am working from somewhat fuzzy memories, but while in Mountain Bell Marketing in El Paso, Texas (this was before the barbarians at SWBT took over the town), I often billed numbers from different COs to other accounts. For example a firm had a PBX in it's office on the west side of town as the main account. The warehouse with a 1FB on the east side of town, in a different MBT admin area and CO was billed via something called an "SBG" to the PBX account. SBG meant special billing group. Note that different classes of service (PBX vs 1FB) and billing dates existed. All of this was overcome. In fact it was common, when looking at service records for the account, to see 5, 10 or more 1FB line stuck on the end of the service record for billing purposes. These lines were all over town. A convenience store or gas station chain's records could be a real zoo! This was not just the case in Bell provided PBXs either. Customers who had misguidedly opted to buy from other vendors (:-)) still had 1FBs tagged on to their trunk bills. The only problem was in trying to bill from a different exchange (note: an exchange is NOT a CO, it is a tariff area!), i.e., from Anthony, Texas a small town on the NM state line, to El Paso numbers. Also, one couldn't cross the business/residential line. There was a way around that using "GBG", Gift Billing Group. I'm not sure we were within compliance with the rules when we did it. But, we did, on occasion, make residential service a "gift" from the business phone. In 1980, things were fairly manual. Service reps wrote orders by hand and they were copied by "order writers", also by hand, to the actual documents that went to the CO, field installation, dial admin, etc. They finally got batched into a mainframe by people in an organization with the acronym "TIGER" after the order was completed. I can't speak to the measured service issues, then and now measured service in Texas is like a state income tax, a socialist idea that has infected other states but to be fought to the last breath here. Ed Hopper